"No," Wolf said. "The killer would be on his way here instead. They haven"t got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle with, I guess, a scope sight."
"Professional," Malone commented.
"It looks like it," Wolf said. "n.o.body even heard the sniper"s shot; the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been fired."
"And, as I remember Collins Avenue--" Malone started.
"Right," Wolf said. "Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll, there"s an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene."
"Lovely," Malone said. "Sounds like a nice complicated job."
"You don"t know the half of it," Wolf said. "There"s also the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name of Miami Beach unsullied."
"All I can say," Malone offered, "is good luck. This is the saddest day in American history since the a.s.sa.s.sination of Huey P. Long."
"Agreed," Wolf said. "Want me to tell Burris you called?"
"Right," Malone said. He flicked off.
Now, he asked himself, how did the a.s.sa.s.sination of Governor Nemours P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get him elected to a governorship. Certainly n.o.body felt particularly unhappy about his death. But he wouldn"t fit into the pattern. Malone reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when he got the chance.
The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought--and then he corrected himself.
Not _finding_ it--_making_ it. n.o.body was going to hand him anything on a silver serving salver.
He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
"Yes, sir?" a familiar voice said.
"Potter?" Malone said. "This is Malone. I want facsimiles of everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are connected with the Society."
"Right," Potter said. "They"ll be up at once."
Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington _Post_. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but it didn"t contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn"t already had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.
FIFTH SPLINTER GROUP FORMS IN DCA BATTLE
That was an interesting one, he thought. The Daughters of Colonial Americans had about reached the point of diminishing returns in their battle over the claims of Rose Carswell Elder, a descendant of a Negro freedman named William Elder who had lived in Boston in 1776 and fought on the side of the Colonies during the Revolution. One more splinter group, Malone thought, and there"d be as many splinters as members. Rose Carswell Elder was pressing her claim for membership, and the ladies were replying by throwing crockery and hard words at each other.
Then there was the Legion of American War Veterans. The headline on this one read:
LAWV OUSTS "ROWDIES": AID MEETING CONTINUES
The "rowdies," Malone discovered, were a large minority group that wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and pretty girls. "The Legion has grown up," a spokesman told them. "This convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for tomfoolery or high jinks."
The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority.
And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page fourteen:
RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES
Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the other item, on page three, made just as much sense:
HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S.
FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE State and Federal Aid Also Promised in Drive to Raise Salaries Now
Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get more money than they"d ever seen before. But Malone could fit that into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he thought about it.
Malone didn"t have time to go through much more of the paper; the facsimile records he"d been waiting for arrived, and he put the _Post_ aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records was the clue he desperately needed.
The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic, un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that, Malone thought, didn"t really matter. Maybe in Russia they called themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He was fairly sure, from what he"d experienced, that the PRS had some kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.
Money didn"t seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and who donated a few dollars apiece each year to the PRS. Besides this ma.s.s of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and seemed actively interested in its aims.
It wasn"t an unusual picture; it was just an exceptionally big one.
Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.
Sir Lewis Carter himself was a well-known astronomer and mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Mathematical Society. He had been knighted for his contributions in higher mathematics only two years before he had come to live in the United States. Malone went over the papers dealing with his entry into the country carefully, but they were all in order and they contained absolutely no clues he could use.
Sir Lewis" books on political and historical philosophy had been well-received, and he had also written a novel, _But Some Are More Equal,_ which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to reach the bottom of the best-seller list.
And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this information did him any good at all, and he didn"t have to think for very long. The answer was no. He opened the next dossier.
Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch had been born in New York. Her mother had been a woman of Irish descent named Mary O"Keefe, and had died in "68.
Her father, of course, had now been revealed as a Russian agent, and was at present making his home, such as it probably was, in good old Moscow.
Malone sighed. Somewhere in the dossiers, he was sure, there was a clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know.
His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete disclosure of all. And he couldn"t see it.
He stared at the folders for a long minute. What did they tell him?
What was the clue?
And then, very slowly, the soft light of a prodigal sun illuminated his mind.
"Mr. Malone," Malone said gently, "you are a d.a.m.ned fool. There are times when it is necessary to discard the impossible after you have seen that the obscure is the obvious."
He wasn"t sure whether that meant anything, or even whether he knew what he was saying. He was sure of only one thing: the final answer.
And it _was_ obvious. Obvious as all h.e.l.l.
13
There was, of course, only one thing to do, and only one place to go.
Malone went downstairs without even stopping to wave farewell to the agent-in-charge, and climbed into the big, specially-built FBI Lincoln that waited for him.
"Want a driver?" one of the mechanics asked.